World

Alex Jones must pay $4.1m in damages for Sandy Hook theories

August 5, 2022 12:14 pm

[Source: BBC]

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $4.1m (£3.3m) in damages after falsely claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.

Parents of a victim have been seeking at least $150m in the defamation trial against the Infowars founder.

They said they had endured harassment and emotional distress because of the right-wing host’s misinformation.

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Twenty children and six adults were shot dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.

The jury in Austin, Texas, decided compensatory damages yesterday, and must still determine any punitive damages.

Jones repeatedly argued that the shooting was a hoax organised by the government in order to strip Americans of gun ownership rights, and that the parents of the dead children were “crisis actors”.